Category: High Fidelity

Draxtor Despres recently visited High Fidelity and got an amazing inside scoop on what Philip Rosedale and the team are doing as well as some marvellous discussion regarding the way virtual reality may be headed.

Inara Pey has already done a magnificent job of covering Draxtor’s show in a blog post on the subject, The Drax Files Radio Hour: giving it the HiFi! I will most definitely echo Inara’s comment at the end of her article :

If you’ve not listened to the entire show, I urge you to do so – as noted above, it is one of the best in the series.

I’ll also add that Inara’s blog post is most definitely worth a read too. What makes this episode fascinating is that although the interview is with people involved with High Fidelity, the subject matter covers the past and future of virtual worlds and virtual reality. Second Life gets mentioned, as does Oculus Rift and various controller devices.

There’s also some interesting discussion regarding how people use devices. For example Philip Rosedale discusses how when people look at a monitor, they move their eyes instead of their head in many ways, that’s because it’s easier for us to do so. However when someone uses a headset, they are more likely to move their head to look around, in a more natural manner similar to how we do when we engage with people in a physical environment.

Continue reading “Draxtor Gets The Inside Scoop On High Fidelity”

High Fidelity recently moved to the Open Alpha stage and with that they also removed their request for people to not blog about some of the inner workings of High Fidelity. The reason for the request was completely understandable as High Fidelity was in the closed Alpha phase when the request was made and public blog posts could make some misleading representations about the platform.

I would still advise people proceed with caution when blogging about High Fidelity because it is still in Alpha and things can change quite dramatically during this phase.

However you can get an insight into the progress and development that has been made so far with High Fidelity thanks to Austin Tate, who has been quietly blogging about High Fidelity during the closed Alpha phase, but kept his blog posts private.

The posts start in May 2014 : High Fidelity Alpha Tests – First Screens, in which Austin took a look at building tools, mesh, chat, using scripts and much more.

There’s also an interesting post about NPC Bots as Assignments, which as you’d expect, covers how one would implement NPC’s within High Fidelity. I’ve had a play around with that myself and it worked quite well as an initial test.

Another interesting post covers Experiments with Oculus Rift DK2, in which Austin talks about how Oculus Rift worked with High Fidelity at the time.

Continue reading “Austin Tate’s Progress Of High Fidelity Posts Are Now Public”

High Fidelity, an open source virtual world solution, has until now been in a closed alpha phase with people only gaining access after being invited to participate. However yesterday they unofficially announced that Open Alpha was coming and now that has been officially announced by Philip Rosedale : High Fidelity Open Alpha.

It’s important to read the blog post before diving into High Fidelity because it includes some extremely important points regarding expectations, for example :

This is a very early release, and High Fidelity is still very much a work in progress. The look and visual quality is far from complete, and big things like avatar movement animation and physics are still not in place. There are lots of bugs to fix, and content formats will continue to change. But enough systems are now functional to make us feel that High Fidelity is useful for some types of work, experimentation, and exploration. Having run a small and controlled early alpha to iron out the really show-stopping bugs, we’re now eager to engage a larger group and recruit open source contributions from other developers working on building the metaverse.

Please bear this in mind because it is an early Alpha product and if you’re expecting something like Second Life in its current form then you will be sorely disappointed. However if you are prepared to put up with an early Alpha product, one in which things could change rather rapidly, then take a look at High Fidelity.

Another important thing to bear in mind, especially if you’re a casual traveller, is that at this stage, there isn’t that much to explore. However as High Fidelity moves to this Open Alpha stage, expect that to change.

Continue reading “High Fidelity Moves To Open Alpha Phase”